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Guerrilla Marketing By Indian Ecommerce Giant Flipkart

Fist of all, let’s understand what exactly Guerrilla Marketing is. It is an advertising strategy that focuses on low-cost unconventional marketing tactics that yield maximum results. The term was inspired by guerrilla warfare which is a form of irregular warfare and relates to the small tactic strategies like ambushes, sabotage, raids and elements of surprise used by armed civilians. Much like guerrilla warfare, guerrilla marketing uses the same sort of tactics in the marketing industry. This alternative advertising style relies heavily on unconventional marketing strategy, high energy and imagination. It generally makes relatively higher amount of impression than traditional methods of marketing.

Here, I would like to draw an example of Guerrilla marketing by now an ecommerce giant in India, Flipkart. They started with selling books online, that too on big discounts. As, India was a conservative country, and people were apprehensive about making payments online. Additionally, plastic card penetration in India were very slow. People do not even blindly trust their regular grocery store shopkeeper, then how one expect them to trust an inanimate website and buy the product without even having a feel of it.

Notwithstanding all the odds, Flipkart undertook a series of campaigns to make people of India feel free to shop online. They gave extraordinarily fast delivery services. They provided hefty discounts even on new arrivals. Moreover, they provided 30 days return policy, in which customer can return the product within the 30 days of buying it.

Flipkart’s reported sales were 40 million in FY 2008–2009, 200 million in FY 2009–2010 and 750 million for FY 2010–2011. In FY 2011–2012, Flipkart is set to cross the 5 billion (US$100 million) mark as Internet usage in the country increases and people get accustomed to making purchases online. Flipkart projects its sales to reach 10 billion by year 2014. On average, Flipkart sells nearly 20 products per minute and is aiming at generating a revenue of 50 billion (US$0.81 billion) by 2015. (Wiki)

In short, they just made the people of India believe that Ecommerce is no alien at all. They made people of India accustomed to Ecommerce to that extend, that they’re now in love with Ecommerce!